The centerpiece is the cover photograph by Guy Webster. The swimming pool setting, which preceded the famous pool scenes in The Graduate by a few months, provides a great pop of color and carries with it all the best baggage of Los Angeles. The pop/folk, high/low tension between the fountain concept and the fact that it’s coming from an old hat is also somehow an effectively descriptive allegory for a harmony-driven hippie pop band like The Mamas and the Papas.

Also, the back side of the record features full horoscopes for each of the band members—a detail which is so 1967 that it hurts.

In promotion of their new (and pretty damn great) Cloud Drive streaming media service, Amazon was offering Lady Gaga’s new record Born This Way for just 99 cents. Now, I’ve never been the biggest fan of her music, but I thought I may as well own a complete record to give her a fair chance — you know, seeing as how she’s one of the most popular artists in the world.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t won over by this record. Instead, I found it even more cloyingly campy and difficult to listen to than I anticipated. It seems I’m just not cut out to be one of Gaga’s Little Monsters.

In disproportion to my interest in her actual music, it is telling that I have now written three posts on Gaga. In fact, I have always admired Lady Gaga as an art director and performer. I think that she and her team come up with some of the catchiest, strangest, most referentially brilliant props and performance conceits in modern memory (her meat dress and cigarette sunglasses come to mind). Now, I don’t find the becycled cover of Born This Way to be brilliant, exactly, but I was pleased that it recalled one of my favorite old pinball machines, Centaur. Back when I first saw the straight-out-of-the-80s Centaur machine at a bar in Seattle, I remember thinking the concept of a centaur being half-man and half-motorcycle was funny but strangely compelling. Would this form factor be a gift or a curse? It’s difficult to tell…

Director and king of the music video treatment, Patrick Daughters, has always had what you could describe as a cute style. Born out of an era when Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry were king, his music videos became known for their in-camera special effects, single continuous shots, playfulness, and a sort of sublime beauty — oftentimes bathed in slow motion.

After an unexpectedly popular video for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Maps in 2003, a critically acclaimed suite of videos for Feist (including 1,2,3,4 and I Feel It All), and his quick dissemination as the director of choice for indie bands who could afford to pull off his ideas (Death Cab For Cutie, The Shins, Interpol, Grizzly Bear), you would be forgiven for thinking you could pick out a Patrick Daughters video from a lineup.

However, it seems that the moody reverence most of us born before 1980 hold for Depeche Mode was able to turn even a life is beautiful type like Mr. Daughters towards the dark side.

His two videos for the band, the first accompanying the tune Wrong (2009) and a new one for Personal Jesus [Stargate Remix], have no sense of salvation baked in. Gone are the children, bright colors, and paper cutouts of his previous videos, and in their place we are shown a sort of decontextualized paranoia and an almost poetic sense of vengeance. Though both videos have Daughters-isms — Wrong‘s distinct stylistic realism and metaphorical backwards-moving car, Personal Jesus‘ slow-mo glittery explosion of water — both of these videos seem part of a new body of work. It seems like Mr. Daughters is pushing outside of his and his audiences’ comfort zone. It’s an interesting direction, and I’m curious where Patrick will go with this new found thematic freedom. I look forward to his next batch of music videos, and I’m very curious to hear more about his rumored upcoming feature film debut.

I liked Lady Gaga’s Madonna impression at the end of the video for her very Madonna-esque new single ‘Born This Way’. I’m not sure if we’ve ever had such an openly self-aware and culturally reflexive pop star.

Andy Warhol, perhaps, comes closest in my estimation — however, as is evidenced in the recent Banksy film ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’, Warhol somehow seems to get the credit/blame anytime anything in popular culture eats itself.

I remember having an animated conversation with several of my classmates back in art school about the existence of creative genius. Andy Warhol and Madonna are the two names from that conversation that I remember everyone agreeing on. I am curious to see what Gaga will be able to create as she moves forward with her entourage of art directors and fashion designers, somehow embodying the spirit of both of these bigger-than-life artists in one unlikely package; Sexier than Warhol and artier than Madonna. Maybe this is what post-postmodernism looks like.

Do yourself a favor and bliss out to Andrio Abero’s newest mix, the fourth in his excellent Psychometry series. Better yet, subscribe to listen via iTunes or RSS — that way, you’ll get DJ Andrio’s dance parties to go as soon as they’re available.

Deerhunter is an interesting band. Their music always seems straightforwardly lovely, but I have a sense of them as a really psychedelic and strange band. Maybe it’s all due to their singer, Bradford Cox, and his on-stage dress-up antics… In any case, stream their new record Halcyon Digest (out as of yesterday on 4AD)in its entirety above. I’ve certainly been enjoying it today, trying to recall the light feeling of long days and bright sun.

Whatever it takes to hang on to whatever traces of summer we’ve got left up here in the Northwest.